This is a short sermon given at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on June 13, 2022. Seeing as Oakland’s second annual Guns to Gardens event is coming up this Saturday, it felt appropriate to feature this week! — Yesterday morning, I stood in the sun and in the shade in the At Thy Word Church parking lot in Oakland. The church is in a rough part of town, I’m not gonna lie. Chain link and wrought iron fences dot the front... Read more
A question came across my desk the other day: When did Christianity become the world’s largest religion? For me, I don’t know if the when matters as much as the how? What does it mean to instead dig into the unconventional way Christianity came to surpass all other major world religions? First, some context: Christianity is an approximately two-thousand-year-old religion, based entirely on the life and teachings of Jesus. Christianity is made up of the Roman Catholic church, Eastern Orthodox... Read more
A sermon from March 13, 2022, given at St. Paul’s Episcopal in San Rafael: Sometimes I secretly call my son’s soccer team the Underdogs. They’re all heart. They go out there, emotions written on their sleeves. They chase after the ball. They epitomize the term, “bruiser.” They do these tricky things with their feet, when they have the ball – it’s kind of like kick to the back, no, to the side, nope, around my left foot, and look, I... Read more
A sermon from October 10, 2021, given at St. Paul’s Episcopal in San Rafael: Good morning! Truth: my family spent approximately 6,395 hours in the last week playing Monopoly. We have also occasionally eaten food, slept, done our homework (and our “grown up work”), read books, played soccer and walked the dog, but for the most part we have built houses on the orange properties, prayed for a double when we landed in jail – “Please God, let me have... Read more
This Sunday, if you didn’t know, is National Back to Church Sunday. Popularized by an organization of the same name out of Colorado Springs, they have “set aside the third Sunday in September as the day to encourage everyone to attend a Bible-based church in their area and for church leaders to create a welcoming, inviting environment for their visitors” since 2009. Now I, as you may well know, identify as Episcopalian, and while Episcopal churches have their own “homecoming”... Read more
This is a sermon from July 31, 2022, given at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, California. Enjoy! — My parents were in town this last week, visiting from Oregon. And on Thursday, as we were sitting down to lunch, my mom said, “Do you know where Mountain View Cemetery is?” Mountain View Cemetery? I thought, thinking about the likely town of Mountain View, over on the Peninsula. “Nope,” I finally responded. I chewed my turkey sandwich. “Well, it’s here in... Read more
Well, if this is not the best question to come across my desk, I don’t know what is. But first, a story (or two, or three): Today was a cuss-worthy kind of day. I got news I didn’t want to get, news that didn’t make me feel like a superstar, news that made me feel sad and frustrated and defeated, all in the same breath. And, oh, I cussed. I cussed something fierce. I went into the backyard, and I... Read more
Today’s questions comes straight from the mouth of babes, which is to say that my seven-year-old asked me this very question the other day (minutes, it seemed, after the same question came in from a reader): “Who made God?” My son understands that just as he came from Mama and Daddy, he also came from God. Although he’s prone to roll his eyes when I remind him that he is God’s beloved, it’s also not hard for him to grasp... Read more
There’s only one CD I ever regret putting in the Goodwill pile: TLC’s CrazySexyCool. It was my freshman or sophomore year of college – and I know that I’m dating myself in a most obvious, mid-to late-nineties sort of way, but there was nothing but love when T-Boz and Left Eye began to sing. I blasted it in my high school bedroom, and later in my college dorm room. “Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls” would have continued to play had my pastor... Read more
This last week, the following question came across my desk: “Why can’t Christians do yoga?” I closed my eyes. I shook my head. Then, just as now, I invite us ask a different kind of question: “Can Christians do yoga?” We ask instead. And the answer is a fierce yes. Now, I’ll be honest: for the first thirty years of my life, I didn’t participate in a whole lot of yoga. This wasn’t because I believed it was bad, that... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In